The Boomers technically start with the year 1946, so they are the Post-War and the Fifties generations. There is no real name for those too young to have fought in WWII. The Depression generation might fit, but nobody uses it.
Nobody talked about generations at all until the post war baby boom changed the demographics of the country so drastically. The Greatest Generation is a backfit that doesn’t truly define a generation of people born within a small period. It covers what they did as adults. It shouldn’t be lumped in with the Boomers and Generation X etc. at all.
I was pretty old before I figured out that “comics” were supposed to be funny. I liked them, though. Alley Oop was one of my favourites. And Major Hoople. Yeah, I’m 2 years too old to be a Boomer. I’m a just plain regular non-aligned-with-a-big-cohort person.
I am shocked to the backbone, to the soles of my feet, that the Immortal Gary Larson’s name has not appeared in this thread.
Is it because he didn’t do a daily “strip”, just the greatest, funniest, weirdest, most wonderful things ever done by the hand of man?
Hey, you’re overlooking how few people have a clue what your username is in reference to. I only know it as you mentioned it before. Little Nemo was an ancient Comic Strip. I believe the lettering was in Hieroglyphs.
Peanuts was funny when I was young. I am not a boomer, I was born in 1966. So Exapno Mapcase, you might need to adjust your scale a we bit. He was very popular still in the 70s among kids. Are you sure Garfield was ever funny? I do not recall this as being true.
I was born in '64, I think that makes me late baby-boomer/Gen X. As I said before, what I found funny had more to do with my age then the year. However, even as a fetus, I thought Family Circus was lame and I only thought Garfield was cool around the same time I thought my older sister’s macramé plant hangers & Galasctica 1980 were cool.
I’ve always hated Garfield, until John got hooked up with the hottie veterinarian Elizabeth. I can’t say I love it now, but I sometimes find it gently amusing rather than consistently “Ho-hum. Here’s another loser joke.”
I came in here to mention Nancy (as an age indicator) and was shocked to discover the strip lives on! I do remember when the strip was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller.
This is getting off-topic but I’ve heard them referred to as “The Silent Generation” because they seem to be a barely noticeable gap between the Greatest Generation that grew up during the Depression and fought WWII and their off-spring, the post-war Baby Boomers. The truth is that the generation born between roughly 1928 to 1945 cannot really be considered “silent.” As youngsters, they were the first group to embrace rock n’ roll. They also were the shock troops in the struggles for civil rights, the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, and women’s liberation. Of course the Baby Boomers, because of their more massive numbers, get the credit (or detriment depending on your point of view) for these things but they mostly stepped into battles that had begun before they came of age.
Every single thing that made Peanuts funny was in the strip before 1970. I don’t think a single major character or major theme was ever introduced after that time. Snoopy vs. the Red Baron was the last big funny concept and that was in the 60s. Do you remember Snoopy the world-famous grocery clerk? Thought not. After 1970 Schultz repeated himself endlessly. He might still have been funny to kids seeing him for the first time, but that might be true of any strip.
Garfield was introduced in 1978 and was funny for the first few years, before Jim Davis discovered merchandising and started farming every aspect of the strip off to a legion of lackeys. (He’s hardly the first to do so but it was so obvious in his case that he became a butt of jokes in the industry.) I think the last Garfield to be truly funny is the little-known Garfield: His 9 Lives, a 1984 collection of “short stories” that can almost be considered a graphic novel. Admittedly, Davis farmed much of this out as well.
I don’t want to get too heavy into history to justify something that’s obviously a joke. I picked the names more or less at random just to make them famous enough for everybody to get. Let’s face it, the number of strips that don’t start repeating themselves and driving the humor into the ground is tiny and not many people would agree with every name on the list. I love comics, though, and I love their history and like many people I hate that old, tired, and unfunny strips litter the pages of the newspaper years after they should be canned.
NDP, I agree with what you write. While the boomers are named for the boom in numbers that started in 1946 (and ended in 1964), I’ve always said that culturally the boomers should be regarded as those people who were teenagers at some point in the 1960s. That’s the group born between 1941 and 1956. I know people who were born after Kennedy’s assassination who are technically boomers: they are culturally a generation removed. If you take the second group in place of the first lots of what happened in 60s culture and the revolution in attitudes, entertainment, styles and politics that took place in the late 50s but mostly in the 60s make much more sense.
Damn. another book I’ll never get around to writing.
